I had a dream
scottaaronson.blog
scottaaronson.blog
As I get older, I also find my body acting more and more for me. Have something important in the morning to do? I don't need to put the alarm anymore, I'll wake up by myself, not really knowing why until a couple of minutes later when I remember "Oh, I had this thing to do, good thing I woke up!".
I think this is what happened in the authors case as well. His mind maybe didn't realize it at the time, that there could be timezone differences that were important, but his body did, so it did its best to steer him towards waking up on time just in case. And in this case, it turned out that his body knew better than his mind.
Maybe this is what people mean when they talk about "gut feeling".
Eventually I moved into meditation and more pantheism relationship with the world - or universe. All things are energy, energy is infinite, open my antennae for the universe to send signals and let me body interpret. As you said, the gut feeling.
In the past year it has been uncanny how often I think about something serious, kind of stare off into nowhere, and have a good path or at least next step I can believe in. I can honestly say it has been calming when for years I’ve had a lot of anxiety about doing the best thing or whatever. Eh that’s a myth, life is situational but we can have a foundation.
Full disclosure: I’ve had serious deja vu since a teenager several decades ago. It’s not frequent, but it’s significant. Not just a feeling or a chill mind you, I see and hear up to about 15 seconds and that includes dialog. Like I know the words about to be spoken. It was extremely eerie until a lady friend in university told me “oh that’s just the universe letting you know you’re on the right path” and it felt so good I’ve believed it ever since.
Hence the duo of deja vu and gut feeling basically being my version of religion, because I can’t really prove them, they take faith, and I make no guarantees outside of this sample size of one!
This doesn't depend on the age. Though it might depend on a person.
For a fun experiment try saying in your head "I need to wake up at 6:55" before going to sleep. No need to look at the watch, no need to repeat it, just make sure you actually want this to happen. At 6:55 you will get a slight nudge that wakes you up just enough to realize it's time and to give an opportunity to wake up fully or to keep on sleeping. Seems like magic, but it works very reliably unless I'm dead tired.
Yeah, definitely by person, because personally it seems to have only happened as I got older. From birth until I was ~30 or so I could sleep through alarms unless strategically placed away from my bed, and if not awoken, I slept until ~2-3 pm, no matter when I went to bed.
Nowadays, I can go to bed at any time and automatically wake up when needed, no matter how tired I'm "supposed" to be.
Neither my habits nor much in my life has changed since I was 25 or so, so guessing it has to do with age, but in reality, who knows why?
In my younger days when I was more cocky and had less "important" responsibility, I often literally did what you described instead of setting an alarm clock. (It didn't always work shrug)
These days even when I set an alarm, I often wake up a couple minutes before the set timer (though sometimes it varies with error up to 1+ hour, so it isn't that precise).
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Aaronson's story (the original article) is a bit more spooky than that though. If this world was a simulation and if there was a way to glitch out, a lot of his work on computability and computational complexity do seem like prime candidates for a theoretical foundation for breaking out of the simulation. The presentation software censoring his work would be a very mild way to warn him about the dangers of spreading the knowledge to the unwashed masses :P
I've heard from a cognitive scientist that we can open our eyes enough during sleep to read a clock.
In fact, at first I thought I had to look at the watch before making this mental wake-up note so that to set a reference point. Turns out that even that is not needed... which is really weird.
That's also based in scientific observations, as it seems that the 2kg of gut bacteria making up the microbiome have a direct nerve connection to the brain.
I'm pretty sure those fuckers are making me crave sugar that they could then eat themselves once it gets down to them.
Good call on the gut science - I’ve been watching a lot of travel videos and really noticing how outside of the US food and eating is a special thing and lovely, not a chore to go back to the warehouse floor.
Survivorship bias exists, but so does gut instinct.
Our brains do far more work behind the scenes than we generally give them credit for. Think of the (admittedly rare) people who get a bump on the head, and can suddenly do savant math, or play piano like a master - that potential was always there. Think of the many examples from the history of science, where the answer came in a dream, or even a daydream.
Waking up in time for a known appointment is not that remarkable, when considered with the fact we have a very sophisticated set of internal clocks, and that dreams often concern future events that we are anticipating or anxious about.
I have countless similar examples from my own life, which could easily be dismissed as anecdata. They're more than good enough for me - I'd be a fool to ignore them.
Truly, I believe that most people just don't pay attention to the hints their mind gives them. Many are tired, distracted, and untrained; overworked and stressed to the gills. If you are one of those people, I can see why you would think that gut instinct is a myth. But it surely isn't, I guarantee it.
The next time you get a line from a song stuck in your head, ask yourself if there's any relevance to your life situation - more often than not, your brain is trying to tell you something.
Maybe your theory of "me" is a bit off from reality? I think Marvin Minsky's book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind is a highly interesting (and mostly ignored) theory (or model) of the mind as a group of agents where each agent tries to reach consciousness. Those that don't reach consciousness (your "mind") are your gut feelings.
She showed us a process for "opening up" our night dreams. By writing them down, identifying patterns, and then looking for deeper meaning. Not through a fixed interpretation of symbols but something more fluid. We opened up a few of our night dreams as a group, including a couple of my own, and I was floored by how powerful and revealing the process was. We learned to use the same process for opening up situations in our waking lives too.
I was incredibly skeptical at first but now I'm sure there is much more to our dreams than we give them credit for. I remember reading once that for many ancient cultures, dreams played a significant role. At some point, probably during the Age of Enlightenment, we discarded them as frivolous.
Before I go to bed, if I tell myself "wake up at 7AM wake up at 7AM wake up at 7AM" I naturally get up within a few seconds of 7AM, almost always because I have a dream towards the end of sleep that forces me to wake up (they are not always relevant but they force me to get up at the right time)
Crazy
But yeah that dream makes a great short story. An exception to the general rule that telling people your dream is boring.
While you are asleep, it's quite common to believe in your dreamscape. (It's also common to tell yourself that it's a dream.)